UPDATE: This list should have included An Education (see comments). Your guide follows:

An Education
• What: Nick Hornby adopted this film from a memoir about a young girl in early-’60s England who falls for an older Jewish man, played here by Peter Sarsgaard.

• Up for: Best Picture; Leading Actress (Carey Mulligan); Adapted Screenplay (Hornby).

• Will win: Its best chance is in Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 5. While the older man’s Jewishness isn’t the film’s dominant theme, or even necessarily his dominant characteristic, it’s certainly in there.

And now, the list.

5: Up in the Air
• What: This flick, adopted from Walter Kirn’s novel, stars George Clooney as professional fire-er. Fans say it’s very now; detractors say it’s very mediocre.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Jason Reitman); Adapted Screenplay (Reitman and Sheldon Turner); Actor (George Clooney); Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga); Supporting Acress (Anna Kendrick).

• Will win: Very long shot at Picture, Director, and Supporting Actress; slightly less long shot at Actor; favorite at Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 2. Largely on the strength of Jewy (and kind of insufferable) director/co-writer Reitman.

4: The White Ribbon
• What: German auteur Michael Haneke’s extremely dark film about a village in Germany immediately before World War I.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film; Cinematography.

• Will win: It’s the Foreign Language Film prohibitive favorite.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 3. Not really explicitly Jewish, but it is dark and German. Plus a prominent Jewish writer called it fantastic in a certain magazine of Jewish life and culture.

3: Inglourious Basterds
• What: Quentin Tarantino’s crazy, violent, hilarious, awesome World War II movie about a group of American Jews whose mission is to brutally kill as many Nazis as possible and then assassinate Hitler, as well as a French-Jewish movie theater owner who secretly plots, also, to assassinate Hitler. Spoiler alert: They succeed.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Tarantino); Original Screenplay (Tarantino); Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz); Cinematography; Film Editing; Sound Editing; Sound Mixing.

• Will win: Waltz is all but a lock, and Tarantino is the Original Screenplay (though not Director) favorite. Also a threat in the technical categories.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 7. Except for Waltz’s SS agent and Brad Pitt’s commando leader, the major characters are Jews; the French-Jewish theater owner is even played by a young French-Jewish actress named Mélanie Laurent. On the other hand, at its heart, the movie isn’t about Jews, Nazis, or really anything besides other World War II movies. Also, Liel hated it (though Germans liked it!).

2: Ajami
• What: Israel’s third consecutive Best Foreign Language nominee, and the first in Arabic, its gangster plot depicts Palestinian-Jewish relations in the titular Jaffa neighborhood.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: It’s a long shot.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8. I mean, it’s Israeli!

1: A Serious Man
• What: The Coen Brothers’s quiet, comic, and in the end deeply serious tale of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor in late-1960s Minnesota who wonders why his life has gone totally to hell.

• Up for: Picture; Original Screenplay.

• Will win: In a just world, both of them (and Michael Stuhlbarg would have an Actor nomination). In this world, probably nothing.

•Jew rating (out of 10): 10. If it were just that all the characters were Jews, and that the comic climax took place at a bar mitzvah, then it would be an 8, maybe a 9. But this movie wrestles with what it is to be Jewish on the most profound level; short of Yom Kippur services, nothing will make you reflect on your Jewishness like sitting through it. The day after A Serious Man gets no love, go see it, even if it’s your fifth time.

Nominations [The Oscars]

Related: Painfully Good [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee

• Norman Finkelstein, the notorious writer (his prime shtick is, he’s the son of survivors who compares Israel to the Nazis), has been trying to secure speaking venues in Germany. [JPost]

• Long Island’s Holocaust Museum and Tolerance Center reopened (after over a year of renovations) with powerful new exhibits. [NYT]

• An interesting feature on how Orthodox students at secular colleges compromise among religious strictures and the reigning hook-up culture. [New Voices]

• At the Jewish Council of Public Affairs Plenum in Dallas, Ambassador Michael Oren called for “compromise” regarding the controversy over mixed gender prayers at the Western Wall. [JCPA]

• Get prepared for the Zaretskys’ ice dancing performance tonight with this (unrelated) clip, which is also set to the Schindler’s List theme music.

This being Hollywood, several Jews were recognized for work that was not explicitly Jewish, including Up in the Air director and co-writer Jason Reitman, and David Rakoff, who had a hand in the writing of The New Tenants, a nominee for Best Short Film (Live Action). Did we mention that Rakoff is a Tablet Magazine contributing editor? Well, he is.

Finally, Ajami, Israel’s first-ever Arabic-language submission to the Academy, became the third consecutive Israeli offering to score one of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominations. Will it be the first to win? The Oscars are Sunday, March 7th, so we’ll find out soon enough.

Do read Tablet Magazine’s resident film buff Liel Leibovitz on A Serious Man (loved) and Basterds (hated). Plus—spoiler alert!—you will be able to read his thoughts on Ajami soon enough.

The 82nd Annual Oscar Nominations [ArtsBeat]

Earlier: Israel Nears Third Straight Oscar Nomination

Related: Taking It Seriously [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

Not me.

Belonging to that class of people that was once kindly called curmudgeonly but for which common usage has since coined far more pungent adjectives, I realized long ago that resolutions were a colossal waste of my time. No single spark of goodwill could ever tame my surging waistline, soothe my familial discords—the Leibovitz clan is made of such stuff as would have Hamlet chuckle in relief, thrilled with his lot in life and flushed with warm feelings for his dear uncle—or rid me of any other sin or sordid imperfection.

Instead, I’d rather commit this day of reflection to finding fault with other people: people who say “take it easy,” for example, people who walk around with old ski lift passes still attached to their jackets, bloggers and twitterers and anyone else infused with insolence but free of introspection. Since year-end lists, however, are expected to be both concrete and concise, I’ll choose just one exemplar, one single embodiment of humanity’s slow and strange descent into the oblivion of idiotic bliss: congratulations to you, Quentin Tarantino.

Since I’ve already expressed my opinion of the celebrated director’s latest effort, Inglourious Basterds, a film as stupid and sophomoric as its intentionally misspelled title suggests, I’ll present as evidence the following nugget from the master himself, uttered in a recent interview with Jordana Horn:

“So now, in Israel, I’m watching the film, and we get into the theater sequence,” said Tarantino. “And literally, not when Hitler gets killed, but when you hear Shoshanna’s voice say, ‘This is the face of Jewish vengeance,’ the whole theater just erupted in applause. I think there were two guys that started it, but everyone jumped in. And you know something? It was violent. It was scary. There was violence in that cheer. It wasn’t like cheering Indiana Jones. There was something bloodcurdling about it. I don’t want to overstate it, but there was an edge to it. There was violence in it … there was blood in the air, which was wild. It was a wild thing to experience. It was a great experience, and it was real.”

Anyone who had seen Tarantino’s orgiastic opuses of severed limbs and tortured bodies should hardly be surprised to hear him describe, with signature thoughtlessness, interacting with a violent and unruly audience as a great experience; presumably, at no point in Tarantino’s meditations on Nazi Germany had it occurred to him that violent and unruly audiences might have had something to do with the rise of the Third Reich. Still, his enthusiasm for revenge, evident both on the screen and off it, requires a longer pause. To understand the true nature of vengeance, we’ll need a guide far more competent than a former video store clerk.

We’re in luck. Read together, this week’s parasha and haftorah provide us with a profound meditation on the true nature of fury and forgiveness. As is befitting a week in which one year ends and another begins, both texts record the last words of dying men to the sons about to succeed them.

In the parasha, Jacob, on his deathbed, summons his brood, blessing each son and assigning a specific role to his clan—the descendants of Judah will be kings, while Zebulun’s heirs will sail the seas and Asher’s seed will grow great olives. Some children—Reuben, Shimon, Levi—are censured for their past sins; still, all are blessed.

Not so the case with David, the hero of this week’s haftorah. As he lies dying, the king, still grieving for the death of his rebellious son Absalom (Absalom!), blesses his other son, Solomon. There are a few pleasantries regarding keeping the laws of the Lord, but the fading monarch soon gets down to business, dictating a detailed list of political foes to slay and supporters to reward.

What a difference a crown makes. Jacob, the last of the patriarchs, was able to overcome his rage, and offer his kindness even to his most devious descendants. He never forgot, but he knew how to forgive. Not so the second king of Israel: even in his last moments, David was still gripped by the cruel calculations of politics and power.

Whereas Jacob was subtle enough to leave his children on a note of reproach and remembrance, condemnation and celebration, affliction and affection alike, all David could muster is a hit list. Perhaps it’s only natural: unlike a father, a king can’t speak the subtle language of nuance.

Neither, it turns out, can most Hollywood directors. Like the ancient kings of the Bible, most contemporary filmmakers hold a staunchly Manichean worldview, and pay their scribes to compose simple stories of good triumphing over evil, preferably with much violence. This New Year’s Day, then, as we make ourselves a long list of solemn promises, let us add one more: this year, let us be more Jacob than David, and reject simple fantasies of bloody vengeance in favor of a deeper, subtler, and more compassionate understanding of mankind and its motives. It won’t make 2010 any less complicated, but it might make it more peaceful.

In fairness, there are other reasons for Germans to particularly like the movie: most notably, as anyone who saw the film over the weekend (and, according to box office numbers, quite a few did) can attest, nominal star Brad Pitt watches helplessly as the film is utterly stolen from him by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who plays a delightfully evil SS colonel. Still, the positive German reaction brings home an often-overlooked, and seemingly counterintuitive, point: Germans today have special cause to loathe the Nazis, since they carried out untold atrocities in the name of a people and culture that contemporary Germany rightly holds dear. You could even argue that modern-day Germans have the biggest beef with the Nazis of any group.

Well, perhaps the second-biggest beef.

Tarantino’s ‘Kosher Porno’ Thrills Germany [The Local]
Previously: You Basterds!

The Baader Meinhof Complex [Official site]
The Journalist Who Exchanged Her Typewriter for a Gun [NYT]

The same critics, though, have engaged deeply with what the film means, comparing it (often negatively) with movies by Ernst Lubitsch, Charlie Chaplin, Mel Brooks, and Steven Spielberg. “Here is an alternate World War II, in which Jews terrorize and slaughter Nazis—a just Holocaust,” Hoberman writes. “Schindler’s List comforted audiences with similar, albeit less outrageous, reversals.… However devoted to movie magic, however, Spielberg would never be so tasteless as to admit the excitement he experienced in asserting his will over history.” In Slate, Dana Stevens agrees that “Tarantino’s rewriting of the war’s ending is audacious and perversely enthralling,” but asks, “Is the best way to work through the atrocities of the 20th century really to dream up ironically apt punishments for the long-dead torturers?” Denby sums it up: “Tarantino may think he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy…but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated.”

Lewis plays a German-Jewish clown named Helmut Doork—suffice to say that we’re making absolutely none of this up—who is sent to Auschwitz, where his job is to entertain the children as they are marched to the gas chambers. So picture Jerry, complete with slicked-back hair but dressed as a clown, doing his schtick, while Jewish children—who all look suspiciously Scandinavian; the film was made in Sweden—are joyfully, laughingly walking unwittingly to their brutal slaughter. Life is Completely, Totally Tasteless. At the end, the clown, having led yet another group of kids to the “showers,” decides to enter with them. Fin.

According to The New Yorker, Lewis—who was battling a Percodan addiction during the film’s production—insists the film will never see the light of day (even as he also insists it is a masterpiece). So we have to rely on those unlucky few who have borne witness. “This was a perfect object,” comedian Harry Shearer told Spy. “This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.” “I was appalled,” concurs journalist Lynn Hirschberg. “I couldn’t understand it. It’s beyond normal computation.” No word on how the French felt about it.

Jerry Lewis Goes To Death Camp [Spy]
Previously: Inglorious Indeed

The masterful 1969 film Army of Shadows, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, follows Philippe, a decent and brave civil engineer, as he becomes one of the leaders of the French resistance to the Nazis. In one of its first scenes, Philippe, portrayed by the Lino Ventura, is arrested by the Vichy police and driven to prison. The paddywagon makes a quick stop along the way, and an officer runs out to a nearby farmhouse and returns with some fresh produce. This moment passes quickly and without commentary, but it nonetheless reveals an entire world: the hungry officer pulling rank, the reluctant farmer forced to part with his precious goods, and Philippe, the man of principle, looking from the side in disgust at the whole tableau. All of the horrors and complexity of Vichy are there, in under a minute, without many words.

Inglourious Basterds begins in the same Vichy countryside, in the same year, 1941. It features the same stock characters—the officer, this time not a French policeman but a Nazi colonel, and the diffident farmer, in whose basement a Jewish family of five is hiding. Unlike Melville, however, Tarantino lets the scene stretch on for many long minutes. It’s a set piece, and it’s there to feature the Nazi officer, Hans Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter and played with elegance and joy by the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz.

Take away the shiny boots and crisp uniform, and Landa is every other memorable Tarantino character. His speech is the same torrent of brio that flows with hilarious eloquence only to shift suddenly into a menacing growl. Think Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Think Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. Think, in other words, of the quintessential film psychopath stripped of all refinement and meaning. More than an obedient servant of a specific ideology, Landa is bad for badness’s sake.

As soon as the lengthy vignette ends, another one begins. This one, too, features a charming, murderous, and vacuous movie trope: it is Brad Pitt’s lieutenant Aldo Raine, a sadistic and callous soldier leading a small gang of American-Jewish soldiers behind enemy lines on a mission to kill as many Nazis as possible. Each of his men, Raine insists, must bring him back the scalps of 100 Nazis, and most of the long sequence that follows focuses on the various methods of obtaining said scalps. We meet Raine’s men, known as the Basterds: there’s Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), a baseball enthusiast who puts his Louisville Slugger to anatomically innovative use; Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), who never met a knife he didn’t like; and so on. The Basterds are given no back story, and there’s little that sets them apart from each other save for their favored method of murder. When we see them on screen, they are usually elbow-deep in Teutonic brain matter.

All this bloodletting leads the Basterds to Paris, where a gala screening of a new film is held in a small cinema, with the Nazi top brass, including the Führer himself, all in attendance. As they watch the film-within-a-film—a Riefenstahl-inspired propaganda piece titled A Nation’s Pride—the Germans get the kind of comeuppance that makes all the previous displays of torture and violence seem tame.

Still, with all the gunned-down, burned, and exploded Nazis scattered on the screen, it is the cinema itself that takes center stage. The theater is burnt down using highly flammable film reels. The movies kill Hitler, literally. Tarantino says so himself, in the film’s production notes: “I like that it’s the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis,” he quips. “But not just as a metaphor, as a literal reality.”

The sentence is indicative of both Tarantino’s failure as a filmmaker and Inglourious Basterds‘ failure as a film. It is a failure not only of imagination, but also of morality. The desire to turn film into a literal, blunt instrument of revenge drains it of the terrific power it has as a sharp and precise tool with which to cut through myopia, forgetfulness, ignorance, and denial. When in the hands of intelligent and sensitive directors, the results are shocking, evocative, world-changing. Consider Melville’s Army of Shadows, or Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, or Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. All three directors cover the same territorial and historical ground as Inglourious Basterds. But they use film not in order to set ablaze heaping mounds of flesh, but in order to try and understand the malice and complicity that led Europe to its benighted state. They do so because they realize that understanding—an act that requires us to learn and see evil not as a black monolith but as a gray composite of many small and often insufferable nuances—is our best claim to humanity, our last chance at grace.

It’s no coincidence that all three of those filmmakers are Jewish. Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn’t see cinema as a way to look at reality, but—ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek—as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn’t worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.

Eerily, that is precisely the point that the film’s impressive marketing blitzkrieg tried to promote. The film, its producers reminded us again and again, is a fantasy, a fanciful flight of Jewish revenge. To that end, Tarantino called on Eli Roth—who is not only an actor but also a director of popular and particularly gory horror films—to helm A Nation’s Pride, the fake propaganda film whose premiere the Basterds crash.

“It was perfect that he had the Jewish guy do it,” Roth said in a recent interview, “because I knew that the more authentic [A Nation’s Pride] was, the more ridiculous it would make Hitler and Goebbels look.” But watch that film-within-a-film closely—a rapid-fire collection of bullets and anguish and explosions—and you realize it’s not that different from Inglourious Basterds. Both are empty cinematic spools of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Like A Nation’s Pride, Tarantino’s film is a bit of shallow propaganda, promoting not some totalitarian ideology but a worldview in which cool trumps consequence, nothing is real, and everything is permitted. If there’s any justice in the world, it’s a vision viewers everywhere will vehemently reject.

“As a fan, I thank you; as your producer, I thank you; as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you,” Bender recounted telling Tarantino after reading the first draft of the script. (He said something similar, though saltier, to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in the magazine’s September issue: “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.”) The 51-year-old bachelor, who put together financing for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, also helped finance the relatively more wholesome Good Will Hunting, which led to an audience at Camp David with Bill Clinton, and, in turn, a second career as a Democratic fundraiser and Israel activist (he’s involved both with AIPAC and the left-leaning Israel Policy Forum). While German critics have lauded Basterds—they do, after all, sort of have to—Bender told the Journal he’s more interested to see how it plays in Israel: “I feel it’s like a little pin in the hay, like, ‘Hey guys, go to Israel.’ I think it’s such a great place, and Hollywood does need to focus on it more.”

The Other Avenger: Tarantino’s Producer Lawrence Bender [Jewish Journal]
Earlier: You Basterds!

In a way, creating Nation’s Pride, the faux-propaganda mini-film, offered Roth his own chance at renegade justice. He says of Tarantino, “it was perfect that he had the Jewish guy do it, because I knew that the more authentic the movie was, the more ridiculous it would make Hitler and Goebbels look. So I was saying, ‘More swastikas, more swastikas.’” And while he wasn’t quite prepared for the feeling he would get after having birthed such a monstrosity (“the first time we showed it to the audience with 300 extras, when they started screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Kill the Jews,’ my stomach turned”), like the horror-directing pro he is, Roth quickly assuaged his nausea with self-congratulation: “You know what? I would have been a great Nazi propaganda filmmaker.”

Eli Roth [A.V. Club]
Previously: You Basterds!

“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”

What drives Tarantino nuts about Jewish perspectives on Jewish violence is the “hand-wringing,” the mishegas over whether or not taking a life—even if it’s a Nazi life—is morally defensible. Having not seen Ed Zwick’s Defiance, about a group of East European Jewish resistance fighters during World War II, Tarantino rightly guessed that there’d be trigger pulling, following by hair-pulling, over the righteousness of fighting back.

This is an old quandary that Goldberg doesn’t attempt to answer, but one that reminds me of something Moshe Dayan once told his students at an Israeli military academy. Having war-gamed the beginning of an IDF confrontation with Arab armies in the Middle East, Dayan asked for the students’ tactical gambits. “And I want no Jewish solutions here,” he said, meaning no agonized thinking that would paralyze quick, decisive actions. Looking at Israel today, one wonders if Jewish solutions still exist outside of Hollywood production companies.

Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger [Atlantic]